But religion does not even try to prove anything, religion requires you to accept what is proclaimed without any attempt of evidence, or logic, what-so-ever.
You've improperly stated the nature of faith. Faith is not a fact like gravity is a fact. Faith is a conclusion one reaches based on one's interpretation of the facts. It's metaphysical, not physical.
All that is required to believe in God is to add up everything we know about the world -- who we are, where we came from, where everything came from -- and then simply ask, why? What's it all about? What's it all for?
The answer you come up with is what you believe, what you "have faith" in. You can have faith that it all means nothing, that it came from nowhere and is going nowhere. Or you can have faith that it must have a meaning above what we can see, that there must be something else beyond it all.
Speaking for myself, I do believe that life has meaning.
If one truly keeps an open mind and lets the evidence speak for itself, the more one learns about the universe, the more one should sees how improbable life is. By one calculation, that figure is 1 chance in 10^-282. Citation: Reasons to Believe"
I'm not up with using faith as a noun ("There is no logic in faith..."). One has faith _in_ something or someone.
The real questions, then, are is it reasonable to believe there is a God? How can one tell if one's belief or non-belief is sound?
To answer these questions, one would explore issues of evidence (What evidence exists for the existence or non-existence of God? What would such evidence look like? What kind of evidence are admissible and inadmissible?), issues of authority (How can we trust the evidence? How can we judge other's claims and answers?), and so on.
"No logic in faith"? No, rather one uses logic to help one decide what to believe or not to believe.
That does not contradict the point. Altruism still benefits the benefactor, if only by making them feel good about themselves for doing something good.
You've not used "benefit" in the same sense in both cases. "That which is to my personal, direct profit" is not equivalent to, "that which makes me feel good". I can feel good about all manner of things that have no direct profit to myself.
Google does not get paid one, thin dime for delivering search results. They get paid for delivering advertisements to potential customers. Google's business model is not all that different from old school, over-the-air TV. Give the customer something they want (TV programming/search results), and while they're consuming that, give them the opportunity to buy something (TV commercials/AdWords, etc.). So, in terms of online ad placement, Google definitely qualifies as a monopoly.
No go back and re-read Cringley's article with this point of view, and I think you'll see his point. In terms of revenue, Google is making some of the same kinds of financial mistakes that other monopolies have made: cozying up to partners, and then crushing them with a copy-cat service, cutting into your partner's business by dinking with their revenue streams, etc. Not a happy place if you work with, but not for, Google.
Personally, I hope and believe that Google is better than that, that they are listening, and will make things right.
Are you certain of this? On the clean vanilla copy of Vista Basic I recently purchased on a new Dell PC, the original fonts were not installed by default -- just the Vista fonts. I had to go and find the old XP fonts and install them manually. Perhaps the difference is in whether you've got a fresh install of Vista or are upgrading from XP...
No matter how long you watch such animals, you would be hard pressed to find an actual situation where that subtle change would mean the difference between life and death.
An often-overlooked aspect of the "selection" part of the theory is that the only mutations which will matter are expressly those which will "mean the difference between life and death". Immaterial mutations don't count.
One big problem with the theory of evolution via natural selection of randomly-generated mutations is how to explain the persistence of supposedly deleterious mutations in a population. If air pollution in England caused peppered moths to rise to 98% of the population at some point, one would presume that there would be a very slow return to light-colored moths now that the air is not so polluted. After all, we've only got 2% of the population from which to "select" light-colored moths.
This, however, has not been the case. The frequency of the peppered moth has declined to 35% just since the 1960s, with a similar rise in the frequency of light-colored moths.
In some respects, then, the predictive powers of natural selection have been proven: moths do adapt to their environment. But the rapidity of the changes create quite a difficulty about random mutations as the source of raw material for selection. I am no biologist, but nothing I've heard our read about the frequency of random mutations indicates that 40 years is enough time for mutations to account for the timing. It seems more likely that the ability of the light-colored moths to increase was already inherent in the population.
Heard a review of KT Tunstall's new "Drastic Fantastic" album on the radio while driving home today, saw Amazon MP3's open beta, and thought -- hey, let's give this a try. Report card:
* Quality of the encode: A.
The files are encoded at in VBR at an _average_ bitrate of 256K. A great-sounding encode, certainly as good as the encodes I rip myself. And yes, I am one of those people who can hear the difference between 128K and 256KVBR, and wouldn't think of listening to anything at a lower bitrate.
* Finding and purchasing the album on the web site: A.
Enter artist name in search box, click on album cover, click "buy". Done.
* Getting the album via the download manager: A.
Download manager installs with NSIS installer, runs in system tray while downloading, unloads itself when done. Manager registers itself as the handler for files with the ".amz" extension, and corresponding MIME type. Simple and elegant.
* Configuring the download manager to put the music where I want it to: A.
File -> preferences -> Pick an output destination. I changed the destination while the album was in mid-download, and it picked up everything from the old location and put it in the new, on the fly. Pretty impressive.
* Reviewing legal terms and whatnot: A.
Nice clear links about what you are getting into. Files are free of DRM, but the license explictly says you cannot share the files with others. Not sure that is strictly enforceable legally, but the point was pretty clear that these files are for you, yourself, alone. People should read the fine print, but there's nothing hidden here.
* Price: B.
Entire album: $8.99. Hey, sure beats normal CD prices, but really, they can do better. Distribution costs are just _slightly_ lower than the normal retail channel!
* Overall: A-.
Amazon MP3 has my vote. I'll probably use this service a lot.
From a technology standpoint, the/compare site isn't that bad. It's clearly not intended for technical people, but for business executives. It tries to put Windows in the best possible light while scaring the beeswax out of you for even thinking of trying Red Hat. The usual Marketing stuff.
The section on interoperability is somewhat humorous, in a dark sort of way, given Microsoft's reputation as the baddest of the bad when it comes to following anyone's standards but their own.
of course any viewpoint that cannot be scientifically scrutinized must invariably be mistaken, right?
Incorrect. There are many things science does not scrutinize: philosophy, art, beauty, hope, love, faith. There is nothing "mistaken" about such things.
IANAL, but if RIAA's practices are found to be illegal, can the artists sue to regain their rights?
If I have some intellectual property, sell the copyrights to someone else, and that person then uses those rights to break the law, do I have any way of rectifying that? Or, at the very least, can I sue for damages against the copyright holder?
I'm more in the "stop complaining about MS and use what works" camp than the "I (heart) Linux" camp. Here's an easy switch that will help everyone, regardless of the desktop OS:
Stop using Visio for software modeling, and switch to something that actually captures design information. Personally, I use Enterprise Architect.
Visio is drawing program. It makes pretty pictures that you can print.
EA lets you describe the parts of pieces of what you want to build, and how they are interrelated. It then draws the pretty picture of what you're planning to build... or creates a web site of the model with a single click... or creates a word processing document... or exports to an XML file... or exports to our internal wiki... or plugs into Eclipse... or generates stub code and DDLs... or... well, you get the picture.
Just how obvious does the corruption in the White House have to be before you demand a change of government?
Well, first off, we don't really like sudden changes in government. We like change on a regular schedule. If someone is unpopular, we wait a few years, and the problem fixes itself.
Secondly, impeachment is typically reserved only for especially egregious crimes: "treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors". Lying about philandering with interns in the Oval office or covering up political email accounts may well be bad, but frankly, they simply aren't bad enough.
Thirdly, the American public consists of smallish groups at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, and a large center that isn't easily aroused. The people at the fringes have been shouting "the sky is falling!" for so long now, that the middle group discounts most of what they say.
So, in answer to your question:
The offense would have to be very grave, not an accumulation of smaller offenses.
The guilt would have to be evident to everyone, not just the partisans.
"Net neutrality" is not a great word choice. Of course the providers should be able to use QoS tools to optimize connections. But it must be done in a content-neutral way.
We don't want the Verizons of the world to be able to give their VOIP packets a high priority, and everyone else's packets a low priority. That would effectively force all Verizon customers to only use Verizon's VOIP.
Neither do we want the Verizons of the world to be able to sell higher priority to specific content providers. This would give Verizon the power to effectively "sell" its customer base to the highest bidder.
Internet providers have an obligation to abide by "common carrier" principles, one of which is that common services must be provided to everyone. Our national highway system doesn't have a "Fords Only" lane for precisely the same reason. The lanes are open to anyone with an automobile, regardless of who made the automobile, where the automobile is going, or why it's being driven. That's the way the Internet needs to be.
The world is not a bunch of governments ruling over these little corporations who spread their tentrils forth for the motherland. Companies superceed governments.
A really insightful post! However, your point about companies superceeding governments may hold true only if the government is open and the market is free. Don't authoritarian governments control key companies -- and even even entire industries -- within their borders?
I suppose the rebuttal would be, yes, they do extert control, but it is limited. A Google or a Yahoo may be forced to operate under one set of rules in China, but they operate under another set everywhere else. So, maybe companies don't "superceed" countries so much as they "encompass" them.
Still, there is something kinda creepy about the fact that this amusement park in China is run by the Chineese government.
These are some pretty good ideas. I especially like the idea of using cryptography as a "quality seal", and the idea of having a tipping system to directly reward the artists and production staff.
If any P2P node or website that hosts content could get a small cut of the income stream from referrals -- but only if they serve up the digitally signed originals -- then it would give people an incentive to share legitimately.
DRM is very beneficial to Apple. It locks all of their customers into a proprietary format that cannot be legally migrated to anyone else's format. In your example above, "re-ripping" your copies of iTunes files would be a federal crime, specifically a violation of Section 1201(a)(1)(A) of the DMCA, which reads, "(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Now that you're locked into Apple, forget about using any other manufacturer's device to play back that content on your new hi-def TV, or changing to another portable player. You're (legally) stuck.
What makes DRM so worthless isn't some technical, legal, or user experience problem. The problem with DRM is that it addresses the wrong issue altogether. DRM tries to answer the question, "how can I stop LOSING money because of copying?" The right question should be, "how can I start MAKING money using copying?"
People are going to be making digital copies of stuff with the Internet because that is what the Internet is: a vast digitial distribution machine. Copying and hyperlinking aren't "problems" to be solved, they are facts of online life. How can artists and distributors and publishers use these facts to their advantage?
Google has certainly shown one way to make money from the web. And no, it's not by advertising. That's merely one way of making money. The real mother lode is in LINKING. Google makes money by bringing buyers together with sellers right at the point where the buyer has pre-qualified themselves. Any time you can do that, you can make money -- lots of it.
Things to note here:
1. It is in Google's interest to provide real value to the customer in clear exchange for the right to lead them to a commercial link.
2. It is in Google's interest to be completely up-front about which links are commercial and which ones are not.
3. It is in Google's interest to only offer commercial links that are as closely-related as possible to what the customer appears to be looking for.
Let's apply these lessons to the music industry. Imagine a large copyright holder having every song in its catalog available on a web site. Visitors can listen to samples of each and every track -- good samples that give a true feel for the music, not just some arbitrary clip such as the first 30 seconds. A search engine helps people find not just the big, popular numbers, but other interesting pieces that are related. "If you like this artist, have you tried these three others? People who have listened to this track have listened to these 10 others. Here is a list of every track of every album that features this drummer."
Every opportunity to share information about music, artists, and compilations is an opportunity to offer a tangible product or service to sell. The web site has clearly marked commercial links to buy physical media, purchase the track, add the track to a mix CD, purchase concert tickets, get a t-shirt, subscribe to a download service. It also has non-commercial links to share what the user has discovered with others. "Hey, listen to this track. It's awesome."
There is a lot of money to be made here. DRM is a distraction. It's leaving money on the table, and one of these days some smart music exec is going to wake up and leave the rest of the competition in the dust.
I can see where attacking the prototype might expose some risks to phishing attacks. The attacker would need to get your domain to issue the bad script code, so the usual hardening techniques (don't trust input, don't accept any executable script code, etc.) would help.
I'm wondering if making the hard-to-guess pointers to standard objects (xmlHttpRequest) could neuter this attack. When your page first starts, you copy the standard prototypes to function names known only to your server.
While I'm a big fan of hands-on projects, there may not be enough time to code a representative project all the way from start to finish in a single semester.
However, there is plenty of time to model the application over its lifecycle, and, frankly, I'd rather have CS students learning how to model rather than spending a lot of time learning a specific language. Learning a language isn't all that difficult. I've had to pick up 5 or 6 languages during my career, and never found any of them to be spectacularly harder to use than any of the others.
Modeling, on the other hand, is something that is useful no matter what language you're writing in. Each step in the life of a software project uses a distinct set of information, and knowing how that informaton becomes transformed and refined as it moves down the pipeline is extremely useful.
As for a specific curriculum, I would take something like the Object Management Group's (www.omg.org) Model-Driven Architecture, and build a course around the whole process from a platform-independent statement of the business problem to the platform-specific implementation in a language of the professor's choice.
Slashdot Mirror
And the Big Bang came from ... where?
You've improperly stated the nature of faith. Faith is not a fact like gravity is a fact. Faith is a conclusion one reaches based on one's interpretation of the facts. It's metaphysical, not physical.
All that is required to believe in God is to add up everything we know about the world -- who we are, where we came from, where everything came from -- and then simply ask, why? What's it all about? What's it all for?
The answer you come up with is what you believe, what you "have faith" in. You can have faith that it all means nothing, that it came from nowhere and is going nowhere. Or you can have faith that it must have a meaning above what we can see, that there must be something else beyond it all.
Speaking for myself, I do believe that life has meaning.
All religions? Every one? All complete nonsense? Every statement, every claim?
For a scientist, you can clearly throw around axioms with the best of them.
If one truly keeps an open mind and lets the evidence speak for itself, the more one learns about the universe, the more one should sees how improbable life is. By one calculation, that figure is 1 chance in 10^-282. Citation: Reasons to Believe"
I'm not up with using faith as a noun ("There is no logic in faith..."). One has faith _in_ something or someone.
The real questions, then, are is it reasonable to believe there is a God? How can one tell if one's belief or non-belief is sound?
To answer these questions, one would explore issues of evidence (What evidence exists for the existence or non-existence of God? What would such evidence look like? What kind of evidence are admissible and inadmissible?), issues of authority (How can we trust the evidence? How can we judge other's claims and answers?), and so on.
"No logic in faith"? No, rather one uses logic to help one decide what to believe or not to believe.
You've not used "benefit" in the same sense in both cases. "That which is to my personal, direct profit" is not equivalent to, "that which makes me feel good". I can feel good about all manner of things that have no direct profit to myself.
Google does not get paid one, thin dime for delivering search results. They get paid for delivering advertisements to potential customers. Google's business model is not all that different from old school, over-the-air TV. Give the customer something they want (TV programming/search results), and while they're consuming that, give them the opportunity to buy something (TV commercials/AdWords, etc.). So, in terms of online ad placement, Google definitely qualifies as a monopoly.
No go back and re-read Cringley's article with this point of view, and I think you'll see his point. In terms of revenue, Google is making some of the same kinds of financial mistakes that other monopolies have made: cozying up to partners, and then crushing them with a copy-cat service, cutting into your partner's business by dinking with their revenue streams, etc. Not a happy place if you work with, but not for, Google.
Personally, I hope and believe that Google is better than that, that they are listening, and will make things right.
Are you certain of this? On the clean vanilla copy of Vista Basic I recently purchased on a new Dell PC, the original fonts were not installed by default -- just the Vista fonts. I had to go and find the old XP fonts and install them manually. Perhaps the difference is in whether you've got a fresh install of Vista or are upgrading from XP...
An often-overlooked aspect of the "selection" part of the theory is that the only mutations which will matter are expressly those which will "mean the difference between life and death". Immaterial mutations don't count.
One big problem with the theory of evolution via natural selection of randomly-generated mutations is how to explain the persistence of supposedly deleterious mutations in a population. If air pollution in England caused peppered moths to rise to 98% of the population at some point, one would presume that there would be a very slow return to light-colored moths now that the air is not so polluted. After all, we've only got 2% of the population from which to "select" light-colored moths.
This, however, has not been the case. The frequency of the peppered moth has declined to 35% just since the 1960s, with a similar rise in the frequency of light-colored moths.
In some respects, then, the predictive powers of natural selection have been proven: moths do adapt to their environment. But the rapidity of the changes create quite a difficulty about random mutations as the source of raw material for selection. I am no biologist, but nothing I've heard our read about the frequency of random mutations indicates that 40 years is enough time for mutations to account for the timing. It seems more likely that the ability of the light-colored moths to increase was already inherent in the population.
Heard a review of KT Tunstall's new "Drastic Fantastic" album on the radio while driving home today, saw Amazon MP3's open beta, and thought -- hey, let's give this a try. Report card:
* Quality of the encode: A.
The files are encoded at in VBR at an _average_ bitrate of 256K. A great-sounding encode, certainly as good as the encodes I rip myself. And yes, I am one of those people who can hear the difference between 128K and 256KVBR, and wouldn't think of listening to anything at a lower bitrate.
* Finding and purchasing the album on the web site: A.
Enter artist name in search box, click on album cover, click "buy". Done.
* Getting the album via the download manager: A.
Download manager installs with NSIS installer, runs in system tray while downloading, unloads itself when done. Manager registers itself as the handler for files with the ".amz" extension, and corresponding MIME type. Simple and elegant.
* Configuring the download manager to put the music where I want it to: A.
File -> preferences -> Pick an output destination. I changed the destination while the album was in mid-download, and it picked up everything from the old location and put it in the new, on the fly. Pretty impressive.
* Reviewing legal terms and whatnot: A.
Nice clear links about what you are getting into. Files are free of DRM, but the license explictly says you cannot share the files with others. Not sure that is strictly enforceable legally, but the point was pretty clear that these files are for you, yourself, alone. People should read the fine print, but there's nothing hidden here.
* Price: B.
Entire album: $8.99. Hey, sure beats normal CD prices, but really, they can do better. Distribution costs are just _slightly_ lower than the normal retail channel!
* Overall: A-.
Amazon MP3 has my vote. I'll probably use this service a lot.
Almost! I use that quote because I love the teletype sound effect they use for the LED tickertape display in the movie. It's so incongruous!
(CHA-CHA-CHA-CHA-CHA-CHA-CHUNK!) **WARNING**
(CHA-CHA-CHA-CHA-CHA-CHA-CHUNK!) THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM!
From a technology standpoint, the /compare site isn't that bad. It's clearly not intended for technical people, but for business executives. It tries to put Windows in the best possible light while scaring the beeswax out of you for even thinking of trying Red Hat. The usual Marketing stuff.
The section on interoperability is somewhat humorous, in a dark sort of way, given Microsoft's reputation as the baddest of the bad when it comes to following anyone's standards but their own.
Incorrect. There are many things science does not scrutinize: philosophy, art, beauty, hope, love, faith. There is nothing "mistaken" about such things.
IANAL, but if RIAA's practices are found to be illegal, can the artists sue to regain their rights?
If I have some intellectual property, sell the copyrights to someone else, and that person then uses those rights to break the law, do I have any way of rectifying that? Or, at the very least, can I sue for damages against the copyright holder?
I'm more in the "stop complaining about MS and use what works" camp than the "I (heart) Linux" camp. Here's an easy switch that will help everyone, regardless of the desktop OS:
... or creates a web site of the model with a single click ... or creates a word processing document ... or exports to an XML file ... or exports to our internal wiki ... or plugs into Eclipse ... or generates stub code and DDLs ... or ... well, you get the picture.
Stop using Visio for software modeling, and switch to something that actually captures design information. Personally, I use Enterprise Architect.
Visio is drawing program. It makes pretty pictures that you can print.
EA lets you describe the parts of pieces of what you want to build, and how they are interrelated. It then draws the pretty picture of what you're planning to build
You cannot know whether the emails were used for government business or not. They were deleted.
Well, first off, we don't really like sudden changes in government. We like change on a regular schedule. If someone is unpopular, we wait a few years, and the problem fixes itself.
Secondly, impeachment is typically reserved only for especially egregious crimes: "treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors". Lying about philandering with interns in the Oval office or covering up political email accounts may well be bad, but frankly, they simply aren't bad enough.
Thirdly, the American public consists of smallish groups at the extreme ends of the political spectrum, and a large center that isn't easily aroused. The people at the fringes have been shouting "the sky is falling!" for so long now, that the middle group discounts most of what they say.
So, in answer to your question:
"Net neutrality" is not a great word choice. Of course the providers should be able to use QoS tools to optimize connections. But it must be done in a content-neutral way.
We don't want the Verizons of the world to be able to give their VOIP packets a high priority, and everyone else's packets a low priority. That would effectively force all Verizon customers to only use Verizon's VOIP.
Neither do we want the Verizons of the world to be able to sell higher priority to specific content providers. This would give Verizon the power to effectively "sell" its customer base to the highest bidder.
Internet providers have an obligation to abide by "common carrier" principles, one of which is that common services must be provided to everyone. Our national highway system doesn't have a "Fords Only" lane for precisely the same reason. The lanes are open to anyone with an automobile, regardless of who made the automobile, where the automobile is going, or why it's being driven. That's the way the Internet needs to be.
A really insightful post! However, your point about companies superceeding governments may hold true only if the government is open and the market is free. Don't authoritarian governments control key companies -- and even even entire industries -- within their borders?
I suppose the rebuttal would be, yes, they do extert control, but it is limited. A Google or a Yahoo may be forced to operate under one set of rules in China, but they operate under another set everywhere else. So, maybe companies don't "superceed" countries so much as they "encompass" them.
Still, there is something kinda creepy about the fact that this amusement park in China is run by the Chineese government.
These are some pretty good ideas. I especially like the idea of using cryptography as a "quality seal", and the idea of having a tipping system to directly reward the artists and production staff.
If any P2P node or website that hosts content could get a small cut of the income stream from referrals -- but only if they serve up the digitally signed originals -- then it would give people an incentive to share legitimately.
DRM is very beneficial to Apple. It locks all of their customers into a proprietary format that cannot be legally migrated to anyone else's format. In your example above, "re-ripping" your copies of iTunes files would be a federal crime, specifically a violation of Section 1201(a)(1)(A) of the DMCA, which reads, "(a) VIOLATIONS REGARDING CIRCUMVENTION OF TECHNOLOGICAL MEASURES- (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."
Now that you're locked into Apple, forget about using any other manufacturer's device to play back that content on your new hi-def TV, or changing to another portable player. You're (legally) stuck.
What makes DRM so worthless isn't some technical, legal, or user experience problem. The problem with DRM is that it addresses the wrong issue altogether. DRM tries to answer the question, "how can I stop LOSING money because of copying?" The right question should be, "how can I start MAKING money using copying?"
People are going to be making digital copies of stuff with the Internet because that is what the Internet is: a vast digitial distribution machine. Copying and hyperlinking aren't "problems" to be solved, they are facts of online life. How can artists and distributors and publishers use these facts to their advantage?
Google has certainly shown one way to make money from the web. And no, it's not by advertising. That's merely one way of making money. The real mother lode is in LINKING. Google makes money by bringing buyers together with sellers right at the point where the buyer has pre-qualified themselves. Any time you can do that, you can make money -- lots of it.
Things to note here:
1. It is in Google's interest to provide real value to the customer in clear exchange for the right to lead them to a commercial link.
2. It is in Google's interest to be completely up-front about which links are commercial and which ones are not.
3. It is in Google's interest to only offer commercial links that are as closely-related as possible to what the customer appears to be looking for.
Let's apply these lessons to the music industry. Imagine a large copyright holder having every song in its catalog available on a web site. Visitors can listen to samples of each and every track -- good samples that give a true feel for the music, not just some arbitrary clip such as the first 30 seconds. A search engine helps people find not just the big, popular numbers, but other interesting pieces that are related. "If you like this artist, have you tried these three others? People who have listened to this track have listened to these 10 others. Here is a list of every track of every album that features this drummer."
Every opportunity to share information about music, artists, and compilations is an opportunity to offer a tangible product or service to sell. The web site has clearly marked commercial links to buy physical media, purchase the track, add the track to a mix CD, purchase concert tickets, get a t-shirt, subscribe to a download service. It also has non-commercial links to share what the user has discovered with others. "Hey, listen to this track. It's awesome."
There is a lot of money to be made here. DRM is a distraction. It's leaving money on the table, and one of these days some smart music exec is going to wake up and leave the rest of the competition in the dust.
I can see where attacking the prototype might expose some risks to phishing attacks. The attacker would need to get your domain to issue the bad script code, so the usual hardening techniques (don't trust input, don't accept any executable script code, etc.) would help.
I'm wondering if making the hard-to-guess pointers to standard objects (xmlHttpRequest) could neuter this attack. When your page first starts, you copy the standard prototypes to function names known only to your server.
While I'm a big fan of hands-on projects, there may not be enough time to code a representative project all the way from start to finish in a single semester.
However, there is plenty of time to model the application over its lifecycle, and, frankly, I'd rather have CS students learning how to model rather than spending a lot of time learning a specific language. Learning a language isn't all that difficult. I've had to pick up 5 or 6 languages during my career, and never found any of them to be spectacularly harder to use than any of the others.
Modeling, on the other hand, is something that is useful no matter what language you're writing in. Each step in the life of a software project uses a distinct set of information, and knowing how that informaton becomes transformed and refined as it moves down the pipeline is extremely useful.
As for a specific curriculum, I would take something like the Object Management Group's (www.omg.org) Model-Driven Architecture, and build a course around the whole process from a platform-independent statement of the business problem to the platform-specific implementation in a language of the professor's choice.